Thursday, July 12, 2012

Many football players (outside the
U.S.) contest their sport on the pitch, clad in either home or away kits, with
the hopes that a good result in their weekly fixtures will propel their sides
upward in the table. That sentence may dizzy the average American sportsman,
who probably wouldn’t comprehend why the most powerful football league in the
world—The English Premier League, or The Prem, for short—not only permits draws,
but crowns a champion at the conclusion of its rugged 38-game season, without carving
itself into subdivisions and orchestrating multiple layers of playoffs. Incentives
do await for victorious soccer that may not capture a title, as the top few
finishers in The Prem gain admission to a couple lucrative, continental club
tournaments: Champions League and Europa League. In addition, and most notably,
the bottom three teams in The Prem must endure relegation, or demotion to an
under-tier, to the Football League Championship division, or ‘Championship’,
the teams of which can suffer relegation, themselves, to a lower division, or
vault into the big show of The Prem. (Multi-tiered football associations in other
countries operate in similar fashion.) On the concept of survival, the punk
band Wire conveniently shouted: “Avoiding a death is to win the game / To avoid
relegation . . .” and “that’s the lowdown,” baby. That’s the climate.

Enter our side, Swansea City FC, a.k.a.
The Swans, who became the first Welsh team to compete in the current version of
The Prem, and just the 45th club overall to reach this uppermost tier in
English football, formed in 1992. The lads climbed into the rarefied atmosphere
of The Prem fresh from an elimination contest among four hopefuls from
Championship, amidst forecasts of great calamity. In short, the soothsayers
predicted a swift return to Championship for The Swans, averring they would
finish 20th out of 20, a one-hit wonder. The Swans, therefore, approached the
season without donning any ridiculous airs. Their coach, at the time, Brendan
Rodgers, frequently reminded spectators and sports writers that the mission revolved
around survival, i.e., placing 17th or higher. They would strive to persevere,
with Rodgers’ guidance, by attempting to control possession of the ball in the
Spanish style, within a system of triangular passing schemes. Synonyms for this
variety of ball movement might include “The Beautiful Game” or “Total Football”—the
latter championed by Dutch legend Johann Cruyff. After their first few matches,
it also became clear that The Swans, in Michel Vorm, were fielding a
world-class goalkeeper, an acrobatic athlete with top-shelf reflexes and
superior instincts, who led Swansea to four blank sheets (shut-outs) in their
first seven Prem League matches. Two of these, unfortunately, involved
scoreless draws at home, where a side would hope to prevail, instead, but The
Swans knocked off West Brom and Stoke City at home, before drifting into the
middle portion of their schedule.

Would they survive, they would
likely require at least one signature win versus a Goliath, and the first of
three such milestones materialized on January 15th, at Liberty Stadium, where
The Swans hosted a traditional powerhouse, London-based Arsenal. Swans Forward
Danny Graham struck in the 70th minute, just seconds after Theo Wolcott had
knotted the score at 2-all for Arsenal, a goal that might have otherwise doomed
The Swans to pursue a draw. Vorm preserved the 3-2 lead with notable
point-blank stops, and in defeating the Gunners, The Swans had toppled a former
champion and perennial title contender. The Swans would have needs to prevail
on the road, and did so, for the first time, versus Aston Villa a day beyond
New Year’s, and later versus West Brom, Wigan, and Fulham. In addition to Vorm
and Graham, other Swans distinguished themselves throughout the 2011-12 campaign:
defender Ashley Williams; midfielders Joe Allen, Nathan Dyer, and slippery Scott
Sinclair; and striker Gylfi Sigurdsson, the Icelandic international on loan. Luke
Moore subbed versus Manchester City and defeated the eventual champions with a header,
and in the season’s final fixture, Graham tallied against perennial powerhouse,
Liverpool; both games at Liberty Stadium ended 1-nil to Swansea. The Swans did
engage in some maddening giveaways, among them yielding an agonizing equalizer
to Chelsea in added time, a match that concluded 1-1 in late January, yet any
student of The Prem would reason that such giveaways, in moderation, don’t represent
outliers, but organic moments that bedevil all sides in all seasons. The
Chelsea result would deprive Vorm, ultimately, from collecting his 15th clean
sheet, but by winding up with 14, the Swans tied Tottenham for fourth overall,
a badge of remarkable defense.

As the campaign wore on, The Swans
tired a bit, and suffered a four-game losing streak to Everton, Spurs,
Newcastle, and arch-rival, QPR. They clawed out eight points, however, over
their final five fixtures, with a respectable loss to second-place finishers,
Manchester United, two shaky draws but important notches, nevertheless, in the
table, and two wins, punctuated by Graham’s goal in the 86th minute versus The
Reds, with four minutes to play in the season. After the whistle blew versus
Liverpool, Swansea City FC had engineered a good bit more than merely weathering
the league. The club placed 11th in The Premier League table, the best of its
graduating class from Championship. We could label the 2011-12 Swansea campaign
as one that culminated in “wild success” or “success beyond imagination” but
The Swans produced, simply put, a winning season, despite dropping more contests
(15) than they won (12). They drew 11 times. I would guess that most American
sports fans would react by sniffing at such a sequence, reasoning that “winning
is everything” and if a team doesn’t capture a Super Bowl title, for example,
or World Series rings, their exploits matter about as much as a shuffleboard
competition in South Beach. Perhaps Americans have grown accustomed to various
professional sports teams mired in chronic tableaux of miserable decrepitude,
with little incentive to do more than concern themselves with solvency. Many
U.S. sports, true, have become dominated by an elite oligopoly of powerful
teams, but nowhere in the NFL, NHL, NBA, and MLB do lousy clubs have to stomach
relegation to lower leagues, or do hungry clubs receive promotion to the top
leagues. Given the big corporate shoulders of the New York Yankees, on the
other hand, we might conclude that the underfunded Kansas City Royals, for
example, finished pretty darned well, under the circumstances, in winning 71,
67, and 65 baseball games out of 162 games over the past three completed
seasons, 2011, 2010, and 2009, respectively, but American culture doesn’t
really reward that kind of spendthrift endurance, spiritually or otherwise.

If we consider that half the
current Premier League football clubs have enjoyed lengthy, uninterrupted
stretches in The Prem, then the odds of Swansea out-scrabbling the other nine
sides—each with more experience than The Swans—still seemed a bit meager, but
cohesive play and clutch performances trumped the doubters. Out-scrabbling, of
course, can exact its own price, and extraordinary manager Brendan Rodgers has
left the club for the vacant managerial post at Liverpool. The Swans responded
by hiring former Danish footballing star, Michael Laudrup, a chap who’s managed
in Spain’s La Liga, who endorses a style of play similar to that of 2011-12
Swansea. He and his roster of likable Prem League upstarts will tour the United
States for three exhibitions in the month of July, and after that, face an away
date at QPR on August 18th, for the kickoff to the 2012-13 Prem. Allegedly, if
Swansea survive a second year in the Premier League, then its ownership may
expand Liberty Stadium by thousands of seats. Beyond a second Prem League
campaign, who knows? The team could compete for “a place in Europe”—entry into
Champs League or Europa. To support Swansea City FC, simply say “Up The Swans!”
as often as you’d like. That phrase goes better with Single Malt Welsh Whisky
distilled by Penderyn, a going Welsh concern that should certainly belong to a
Premier League of World Whisky Distilleries, and a brand that could, indeed,
survive—and take it all! Up The Swans!

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Differentiate between “I thought it” and “I said it to
myself.” Did you think “torrid” or did you say “torrid” to yourself? The value
of “torrid” is irrelevant except to note that Žižek cannot aid you any longer,
if he aided you, ever, at all. Clays, as verb, would be more assistive: he
clays, she clays (together) the theory of devotion, for example, amidst the
various “systems of devotion.” Theories, that is, versus actual deference,
which brings me to Metacarpalism. There are five metacarpals in each hand, offering
us ten ways to translate our persistent concavity—if only you’ll shiver off the
euphoria. Please, please, please shiver off the euphoria, now. If you were post-structural
ever, at all, you might consider puncturing the glass and plunging the big red
button that proclaims: Deconstruct. Derrida cannot aid you any longer. Did you
think “differentiate” or did you say “differentiate” to yourself? One
curvilinear form maps itself to another curvilinear form. That’s called
correlation; it’s renewable. Facts about the metacarpals will not
open your hand. Metacarpal Diem: Open your hand.

APPEARANCES WITH HETERODYNE IMPROVISATIONAL MUSIC PROJECT

I have appeared several times (as “Words”) with the Heterodyne improvisational music project, which is led by Maria Shesiuk and Ted Zook. Other performers have included Sarah Hughes, Leah Gage, Doug Kallmeyer, Bob Boilen, Sam Lohman, Amanda Huron, and Patrick Whitehead. Here are three free sample recordings, each about 30 minutes long, available on Soundcloud: